


Restless (Contentment)

by aesterismo



Category: Saiyuki
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 15:24:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 820
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/599312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aesterismo/pseuds/aesterismo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Even when Goku dreams, he can’t settle down.  The reasons escape him along with everything (and everyone) else.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Restless (Contentment)

Goku dreams.

When he closes his eyes to sleep (he’s always the first out of the four of them - early to bed, early to rise, as Hakkai often said), the images assault his senses in muted clarity.

Goku dreams in blurry, lingering images: clouds of blue and sunsets of gold, ribbons of color interwoven and melding into one brilliantly indistinguishable mass of shades and tones, to the point where he’s not sure what color to call it.

Goku feels them, touches the colors in his dreams and reaches out for a figure behind the indistinct curtain, a veiled form that never speaks, never moves – even as Goku reaches out to it – but he still tries to reach out in hopes the impossible will finally happen.

(Syllables dance along his outstretched fingertips grazing the silk curtain of night, starbursts flickering behind closed eyelids.  **Light.** )

Goku hears.

The unspoken questions, the unspoken sentiments, the unspoken fear between the four of them - he knows it’s there, tastes it in the air. They underestimate him sometimes, Goku knows, scrutinizing eyes that take in his boyish visage and lanky form and little else.

But Goku knows - surer of this single truth more than anything else – that the four of them are bound by more than just obligation.

Goku knows it, feels it in his bones, senses it from the growing camaraderie settling into their easy companionship. Senses the changes, long before they even happen and even longer before he learns the reason for them. Goku understands.

When Hakkai tells him to let Sanzo be when the priest falls into another one of his sour moods, Goku understands. of course he does. When Gojyo bargains with Goku the night before their siege on Gyokumen’s castle to let him room with Hakkai alone, Goku easily relents.

He understands, of course – he understands, more than Gojyo probably ever will, how the warmth of a single person forms unbreakable bonds.

He can’t explain it, but the loneliness that settles in his heart whenever he’s apart from Sanzo feels like the sadness in Gojyo’s eyes when Hakkai grows distant and clipped with the halfbreed after a rare but always serious argument. The look of it reminds him of a feeling, a feeling he can’t name or recognize, comparable to a hollowed and haggard hunger.

(The look in his eyes, much like how Goku feels whenever he wakes from those strange dreams, seem oddly close to longing.  And love.)

Goku loves many things, far too many things.

Goku loves. He loves much less than he hates – and even the things he hates aren’t so bad. They’re a lot more like non-preferences than anything else; activities or objects or ideas or people that he could do without was a much better description of the things he didn’t love. After all, there was so much to _love_.

The sun peeking out after a long rainstorm. the biggest and brightest fruits: handpicked, sun-kissed, and ripened by time. The smell of freshly laundered clothes and just-dried blankets still warm from the sun. The space to dance and run and breathe out in the open air, preferably beside a riverbank or a lakeside, with insects humming and water pistols and plenty of rice crackers and common company.

Like Sanzo’s hands after a long day of traveling, running through his hair, idly making a mess of the already tousled brown mane and calloused palms drifting down to hold his face & glide down his arms, waist, thighs, pulling him close until they couldn’t get any closer. Like the familiarity that came with the sharp planes of Sanzo’s body, whether held down against his own or ground firmly against him,

Knowing every part of it – the slight dips, the bruises, the firm muscle, the raised goosebumps in alabaster skin – was **his** , all his.

Like the trailed whispers down his spine, the pulses skipped and the sudden intakes of breath, the mumbled litanies of curses and praises, the murmurs of heartbeats picking up and falling back down again (like them, like their journey, to their destination and to each other), the banter exchanged and promises made, all of it in the name of something like love, for a better tomorrow, or perhaps for love itself—

For love, for the feeling it brings him, Goku dreams. Goku understands it better than Gojyo, Hakkai, and even Sanzo give him credit for.

Goku loves, because he can. Because he does.

Because whenever he closes his eyes to dream at night, Sanzo’s nearby presence against his arm reminds him of a single truth: that just as easily as his eyes can close to fall into a world of dreams of his own creation, his eyes can open to a world that he knows, _knows_ , will be bright (like golden hair, violet eyes, and hands far warmer than the sun), will grant them as bright and as beautiful a future he believes they’re fighting for.


End file.
